8th Century, 701 to 800

702 Drawing
from the Chinese and Confucianism, the Japanese have established new laws –
the Taiho Code. The emperor is seen as having supreme moral authority and as a benevolent ruler. His ministers and bureaucrats are viewed as agents of morality. It is believed that without this moral authority the immorality of feuding
local lords would reign. Local lords, it is believed, should submit to the emperor's rule for the sake of peace. Accompanying this centralized
authority, a national tax system is devised.

705 Empress Wu has proclaimed a new
dynasty of her own family line. She has lowered taxes for farmers, and agricultural
production has risen. She has strengthened public works. But by 705 she is in
her old age and has lost control at court. Officials at court force her to
resign in favor of a member of the Tang family – the return of the Tang Dynasty.

708 In China, boiled water is safer to
drink than untreated water, and tea becomes popular accompanied by the belief
that tea has medicinal properties.

710 Japan's emperor moves the capital
from Osaka to the city of Nara in order to avoid
the pollution of his predecessor's death.

711 A Muslim army crosses the Strait
of Gibraltar and begins a conquest of Spain. Jews welcome them as liberators.
An Arab ship is plundered by pirates near the mouth of the Indus River, and
the Arab governor in Mesopotamia retaliates, sending an expedition, said to
include 6,000 horses and 6,000 camels, to conquer the rajas of
Sind.

712 The new Tang emperor, Zhongzong,
has died and his wife, Empress Wei, is suspected of having poisoned him. She
has tried to rule as had Empress Wu. She has sold offices and Buddhist monkhoods.
She has created enemies whom she has failed to exterminate, and they oust her
from power.

717 Arabs have conquered eastward across
land to the western border of China. They have conquered Lisbon and in the Caucasus,
including Armenia. Caliph Omar II grants tax exemption to all believers. Wealth
has been gathered from looting the wealthy during conquests and by taxing non-Muslims.

718 Constantinople, ably led by a general
called Leo the Isaurian, has held off Muslim attacks by land and sea for more
than a year. Leo is now Emperor Leo III. South-Central Europe is to remain Christian.

722 Emperor Leo III forces conversion
of Constantinople's Jews.

726 Emperor Leo III issues an edict
against the worship of icons, seeing it as the main reason Jews and Muslims
cannot be won to Christ. The cross is to be maintained as the symbol for Christianity,
but worship with other images, including those of Jesus, are not permitted.

731 English historian and theologian,
Bede, writes his Ecclesiastical History. He beings numbering the years
from the time of Christ rather than from the reign of kings – his numbering
to be divided between BC and AD (or BCE and CE).

732 Muslims were making piratical raids
from Spain northward across the Pyrenees into territory of the Franks. Charles
Martel leads an army that defeats a Muslim army led by Abd-er-Rahman – who was
not on a mission to conquer all of Christendom.

737 For two years Japan has been suffering
from a small pox epidemic. Perhaps as much as one-third of the population has
perished.

745 China has accomplishments in poetry,
painting, printing and is a vast empire, but its monarchical system tends toward
failure. The Tang emperor since 712, Xuanzong, has fallen under the spell of
his son's wife, Yang Guifei, a Taoist priestess. Emperor Xuanzong is ignoring
the economy and China is again declining.

750 Sometime around this year Mexico's
great city of Teotihuacan (Teotihuacán) is among
those cities destroyed and left in ruins, its great palaces burned to the ground.
The city's population is reduced to a few people living in hovels in a few sections
of the city.

750 The Umayyad caliphs have lost people
willing to fight for them. They have been overthrown by an army of mixed nationalities
from Khurasan (east of Persia). The last Umayyad,
Marwan II, is beheaded and his relatives are murdered. The new caliph is Abu-Abbas
al-Sarah. Rule by the Abbasid caliphs has begun. The Abbasids begin ruling with
a show of Islamic piety, and they talk of reforms. They give prominence in state
affairs to Islamic theologians and experts in Islamic law.

750 Arabian mathematicians begin using
numbers that originated in India, are an advance of Roman numerals and that
Muslims will pass to Europeans.

751 An Islamic army in Central Asia
defeats the Chinese (at the Battle of Atlakh). Muslims replace the Chinese as
the dominant influence along the Silk Road.

751 The last Merovingian king of the
Franks, Childeric III, is deposed. The Merovingians had ruled as they pleased,
including enforcing what they thought was their right to deflower a commoner's
bride before he was allowed to consummate his marriage. A new dynasty, the Carolingians,
is begun by Pepin the Short, the son of Charles Martel.

755 Alliances and trade between Mayan city-states have begun to break down. Malnutrition is on the rise. A diminishing food supply might be creating social upheaval and war.

756 Abd Ar-Rahman, an Umayyad prince,
has escaped slaughter by the Abbasids and establishes himself as emir at Cordoba,
Spain.

770 The Fujiwara family removes Empress
Shotoku from power. She had fallen in love with a Buddhist monk, Kokyo, whom
she had promoted as her chief minister. Nara Society was shocked. Henceforth
women are exempted from imperial succession.

771 Charles becomes king of all of
his father's empire. He is a devout Christian and to have four wives and children
by five mistresses.

772 Charles, eventually to be known
as Charles the Great (Charlemagne in French), begins thirty years of conquest
and rebuilding the empire of the Franks, with an infantry carrying axes,
spears and shields of wood and leather.

774 Charlemagne overruns the Lombards
in northern Italy. He divides Lombard territory with the Pope, creating the
Papal States.

775 Charlemagne begins his war against
the Saxons in Germany, with slaughter and forced conversions to Christianity.

780 At Constantinople, Byzantium's Emperor
Leo IV dies, and his wife, Irene, becomes regent for his son, who is ten. Leo's
brothers, called Caesars, begin to plot for power, but Irene has them whipped,
their heads shaved and banished.

784 The Japanese begin a war against
the Ainu – in the north on the main island of Honshu. The new emperor, Kammu,
wishes to be free of influence from the Buddhist monasteries around Nara, and
he moves his court thirty-five miles from Nara, to Nagaoka,

787 Empress Irene convenes the 7th
Ecumenical Council, which refutes the iconoclasm begun by Constantinople's Emperor
Leo III in 726. Among the masses and many clerics the worship of relics has
persisted. The torturing, blinding and banishment of relic worshippers has ended.
It is widely believed that the previously outlawed images work miraculous cures.

787 Charlemagne, king of the Franks,
is learning to read, and he reproaches ecclesiastics for their uncouth language
and "unlettered tongues." In hope of creating an educated clergy he orders every
cathedral and monastery to establish a school where clergy and laity can learn
to read. His rule includes land for nobles who provide him with military service.
He depends on the allegiance of distant counts, dukes and bishops within his
realm, men with some independence because of the distance and slowness of communications.

788 Indian philosopher Shankara develops
a philosophical system that equates soul with God.

789 A Shia
kingdom is established in
Morocco independent of the caliph in Baghdad.

791 Buddhism becomes Tiber's official
religion.

793 By boat, Scandinavians reach the
island of Lindisfarne, Scotland. They kill monks and loot the monastery there.
It is the first recorded raid by those to be called Vikings.

794 In Japan, disease
and death of an heir to the throne are perceived as bad
omens. They royal family believes that the spirit of the
dead needs to be placated. The emperor, Kammu, moves his
family from a palace considered contaminated to a new capital,
Heian-kyo, to be renamed Kyoto.

797 At Constantinople, the Mother Empress,
Irene (now between 42 and 47), and her emperor son, Constantine IV (now 27),
have been competing for power. Irene has won. She has her son blinded and exiled.

800 In central Mexico around this time, give or take a couple of decades or so, at Teotihuacan, structures belonging to the elites of the city are burned to the ground.

800 Charlemagne is crowned by Pope
Leo III, who hails him as "Augustus, crowned of God …emperor of the Romans."